How can I trace the common Visitors?

Analysis of the traffic come to my websites

[sumit4322]

I have two websites to promote my single product. These sites are getting good rank in the search engines for the same key-phrase. How can I trace-out those visitors who commonly visited to both of the websites?

[sumit4322]

Is there any software or tool to find those common visitors?

[sumit4322]

I'm very sad....not get any reply yet. Does my question confused you?

[guitaristinus]

Download Analog.

[analog.cx...]

[eelpie4u]

Best thing I've come across is stat counter at
[statcounter.com...]

You can make the counter invisible, put it on every (or all) pages you want tracked. It will tell you where the person came from, what pages they visited (in order), how long they stayed, keywords they used to find you, their isp, their geographic location, etc. And it's free.

You can make the counter invisible on your site if you wish, and you can do multiple sites.

I found it really useful when I started to analyze a web site I'd been working on, and realized that a couple of pages had very little hits. I removed them, and am happier because the site has a more "streamlined" look to it.

Caio

[larryn]

sumit,

Basically you need to do something that is generally frowned upon, hence the lack of response.

Tracking users between two distinct sites requires the use of some sort of tracking ID, most commonly a cookie. But cookies are available solely to the originating domain, so if your two sites are on different domains. There are ways to use 'third party' cookies, but that is a) generally frowned upon, b) unreliable as many browsers now come defaulted to only accept cookies from the originating site, and c) requires additional scripting and/or loggging to capture and merge that information.

[Storyman]

Isn't this something you could do by logging the IPs and comparing the list from the two sites?

[cgrantski]

Except for those few people with their own IP, or who are in a smallish company with its own IP, comparing IPs will be a mess.

If your two sites are publicly related to each other, it's entirely legitimate to use a single cookie and a client-side tracking system (embedded script on page) to track the same visitor (identified by permanent cookie) on both sites. It will be a third-party cookie - either a true third party (HitBox, WebTrendsLive, etc) or yourself as third party if you host the data collection yourself. If you have an exceptionally wary audience that has turned off third party cookies, there will be some data contamination. But the average person doesn't bother.

If it's supposed to be a secret that these two sites are related, you're on iffy ground in the first place and using a tracking system that goes across both sites will be questionable. It will reveal to savvy visitors that you are related, for one thing.

[Storyman]

cgrantski,

Will third party cookies be considered spyware by programs like Spybot?

[cgrantski]

I can't say for certain, but I've used Spybot, Ad-Aware and a couple of others, and they all work from lists of specific domains that they consider spyware. Some of them sell subscriptions to keep the list updated and accept suggestions about what to investigate and add to the list.

Lately, I've noticed that the big "legitimate" traffic tracking outfits, like HitBox, WebTrends, and Coremetrics, that used to be on the lists have been dropped. I think that's because there are much worse entities out there than those that are used just for analysing traffic and improving websites using the data, or at least the Spybots of the world may have been persuaded that way.

So I'll go out on a limb and say, I doubt it's an issue. But that's not to say that, if somebody uses this kind of tracking on their sites in a way that can be considered unethical or harmful to visitors, Spybot and others won't find out about it and add you to the list.